Cupcakes

Last week a group of college republicans at UC Berkeley had a bake sale to represent their views on affirmative action.  In their view, affirmative action gives special treatment to African-Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Women.  To highlight this "injustice", the college republicans sold cupcakes to African-American students for 25 cents, to Latinos for 50 cents and to White students for $2 (or some variation of this).  The implicit argument of this bake sale is that it replicates the system of allowing African-Americans into universities when there are better white student applicants, again the idea of special treatment.  The fundamental problem with this bake sale is that it fails to take the history of our country into consideration.

If you were to hold a bakesale that truly reflects the history of race and ethnicity in the United States, you would have to do this: Let's say the bake sale is going to last for 4 hours.  For 3 hours and 59 minutes you would give the cupcakes away free to all the white students, and then you would give the cake mixer machines and batter to the white students' white friends, so they could make free cupcakes for their white friends.  Very quickly the white students would become the presidents of all the cupcake associations, they would become the CEOs of all the cupcake companies, and the principles of all the cupcake schools. A bunch of white kids with a bunch of cupcakes and a bunch of cupcake power.  You would then force the black students to make cupcakes for 3 hours and 59 minutes in the hot sun, while being whipped and occasionally hung for asking for a cupcake.  After 3 hours and 59 minutes of laboring in the cupcake fields, for 40 seconds you would sell the African-American students cupcakes at $500,000 each, forcing them to take out loans to pay for the cupcakes from white student cupcake bankers.  For the last 20 seconds, someone with sense of history and justice would step in and say, okay, for the last 3 hours, 59 minutes, and 40 seconds, black students have paid a severe price and have received no cupcakes.  This person would say, "I can see that the white students have all the cupcakes and the means to make cupcakes and now occupy all of the important cupcake positions.  To attempt to give black students the opportunity to make and enjoy some cupcakes, we'll give you some of the shitty cake mixer machines and batter."  And with the fucked up cake mixers and batters, the black students would go out and make hellof good cupcakes.

At the end of 4 hours, the African-American students would be busting their ass to make cupcakes, trying to compete with all the white kids who already have hellof cupcakes.

And if you get all in twist about the words "with a sense of history and justice," consider the Civil Rights Movement.  Just consider the Civil Rights Movement for a moment, the greatest form of Affirmative Action our country has seen.  Think of all the African-American women and men who put themselves in harms way to change an oppressive system.  Think of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement who were assassinated, jailed, and beaten.  I don't think the college republicans who hosted this bake sale would argue that the Civil Rights Movement was a mistake, that things were better under Jim Crow, when the KKK was running around hanging African-Americans.  I think the college republicans would say "yes, the Civil Rights movement was a good, necessary thing."  But then they will say but that's in the past, today Obama is the President, everything's cool.

Nope.  Look at the numbers: the percent of African-Americans on death row, the percent of African-Americans not going to college, the percent of African-Americans with less wealth than whites, the percent of African-Americans stopped by police.  This is not because African-Americans are bad people.  These numbers are the result of our history.  The brutal history of enslaving African-Americans, and then "freeing" them into separate but equal, water fountains, backs of buses, violence and murder has fundamentally shaped neighborhoods today, shaped the population of political, business and educational leaders.

Changes have been made and things are better now than when African-Americans were slaves.  But the history of brutality and oppression, hundreds of years of this, has left us with a situation today where affirmative action must be taken to rectify a disgraceful past.  And it is a disgraceful past.  And it is all of our responsibility to work towards greater equality.  It is not about guilt, it is about equality.  It is about justice.